I’m sure you’ve sensed all the buzz about Ubuntu going multitouch. I truly think that this is some great news, being the multitouch and HCI enthusiast that I am. But what if you want to test your multitouch hardware? Or if you want to actually develop multitouch applications? Here’s something for you: PyMT has just been released in version 0.5!

We’ve been working hard to make this reality, and many a new feature has been added and quite a few bugs have been squashed. I suggest you read the full changelog and, if you already have a PyMT 0.4 application, also the migration guide.

One of the coolest new things with this release is the availability of portable binary packages for Windows and OS X. Those come bundled with everything you need (on Windows, even Python) to get started. You simply download the package for your platform and run it. We didn’t provide a portable package for Ubuntu, but it’s ridiculously easy to install PyMT there anyways. On Ubuntu 10.10, all you need is:

sudo apt-get install python-pymt

PyMT has native support for multitouch devices on Linux that are supported by the kernel, all Windows 7 multitouch devices, all of Apple’s multitouch accessories and much more. If you know basic python, PyMT is the easiest way to create multitouch applications or to just test your hardware.

In future releases we’re planning to fully use a rewrite of our current OpenGL abstraction and other performance-critical parts (that we start doing in C) that will allow for much higher application speed, less battery consumption and OpenGL ES/3.0 compatibility so that we can smoothly run on portable slate/pad devices.

Lastly, see what people have done with it (planet readers, click the images to get to the videos):

I hope that sparked your interest. We also hope you enjoy PyMT. If there are any questions, bugs, problems or feature requests, let us know. There’s a mailing list, a google code issue tracker and our IRC channel at irc.freenode.net in #pymt.